


Both

by Kanthia



Series: Life Goes On [7]
Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Full Moon, High School
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:01:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24211009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanthia/pseuds/Kanthia
Summary: And he says, okay. Saiyan or human: sometimes I just really want to eat a raw egg. Shell and all.And she says, might be a Saiyan thing, but I know humans who’d do that. Kinda -- nice contrast, the crunch, the goo?And he says, Saiyan or human: whenever you take off your shirt, I can’t breathe or think straight.
Relationships: Videl Satan/Son Gohan
Series: Life Goes On [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1454302
Comments: 5
Kudos: 86





	Both

**Author's Note:**

> the moon: is full
> 
> me: you could write a fanfic about this

You spend enough time around a person and you start to notice little things about them. Maybe that’s one of those normal-person-knowledge-things Krillin warned him about, like that ice cream gives you a headache or that math tests are considered unpleasant, but it had come as a thrill to Gohan when he realized he was learning things about Videl, and he filed those bits of knowledge away with joy: that she favoured her left leg, that she ate her rice from the outside of the bowl towards the centre, that when her ki flared, it started at her stomach and spiralled counter-clockwise -- how unlike the clockwise he’d known in himself his whole life, but felt clean and fresh each time she gathered herself, like a mountain breeze, like springwater.

And she was beautiful, too, once he allowed himself to acknowledge that. Poised and self-confident. Strong-willed, but willing to listen to experience; feisty, but smart with how she used her resources, her power. Took time and effort to learn how to fly, but when she first took off into the air, and she laughed and laughed and laughed -- and it was such a pretty laugh, joyful and carefree, and it stirred something up in him, something he hadn’t felt since those days on the hills…

 _When you love someone truly, you want to make yourself better for them,_ his mother had said, quietly, over a dinner of fried rice and contemplative conversation. _I can’t stop you from going after her -- Lord knows my dad tried the same thing with me -- but if she breaks your heart, Gohan, I’m going to tear hers out._

Gohan wants to make himself better for her. He also wants to tear out someone’s esophagus and present it to her to demonstrate his worth, which he assumes is a Saiyan thing.

That’s another thing he missed, while his father was gone. One would think that by his age he’d have it all figured out, where the human ended and the rest of him began, but it was less a clean split and more a hedge maze of instincts and desires and weird bodily quirks. Do regular people sweat when they’re nervous, too? Do they fight off thoughts about crushing flowers and eating dirt? Do they stare off into the stars at night, wondering, wondering?

 _Yes,_ Videl says, sleepily in his arms, illuminated by the light of the moon through his bedroom window. _Yes and yes. Not really the dirt thing, but I know kids who’d eat grass, which is pretty much the same thing, yeah?_

And he says, _okay. Saiyan or human: sometimes I just really want to eat a raw egg. Shell and all._

And she says, _might be a Saiyan thing, but I know humans who’d do that. Kinda -- nice contrast, the crunch, the goo?_

And he says, _Saiyan or human: whenever you take off your shirt, I can’t breathe or think straight._

And she laughs and says, _that’s human all right._ And she obliges, generous and caring, thoughtful in her instruction, patient. Giving. He yields to her and she shows him how much can be accomplished with the smallest twitch of one’s hips. In those moments he is not the boy who killed Cell and she is not the girl whose father killed Cell; he is more than half of something, and she is more than her name.

When they’re done she rolls off him, tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. _It’s not fair,_ she says. _You pick this kind of stuff up so quickly. I’m gonna run out of things to teach you._

 _I guess you’re just too good of a teacher,_ he says, and she chuckles, reaches out her arms. He gathers her under his chin.

She yawns and closes her eyes. _Full moon’s pretty tonight._

Yeah, the full moon is pretty. They’d put it back in the sky soon after arriving home from Namek, when it seemed like Gohan’s tail was gone for good -- a nice little reminder that Gohan had himself under control, hanging up there every night.

 _Saiyan or human,_ he says, then stops. To a human being the moon is not a destination, nor a promise of power, nor a threat about control. _Videl, I --_

_\-- Gohan?_

_\-- I feel,_ he starts. It’s all wrong. _I feel kinda weird. With the full moon. Is that, Videl, is that Saiyan or human?_

_Hey, Gohan. Look at me._

He does. She takes his face in her hands, gently.

_You’ve got it mixed up, Gohan. It’s not a Saiyan thing or a human thing. To some people the moon is just the moon, and to other people it means something. To you it means something. That’s okay. That’s normal._

_Do you -- do normal people ever -- just need to hurt something --_

_Gohan. Breathe with me._

He sucks in a lungful of air, feels her chest expand and contract pressed up to his -- her little paper ribs, her porcelain heart. He could tear it out and eat it whole if he so pleased. He sucks in a second breath of air. The boy in the white cape clenches his fists. He’d been so anxious that morning, anxious for a fight and anxious for the future, that he’d gone numb in the fingers. He takes a third breath. Piccolo is roasting apples over a campfire, and the Saiyans are four months away.

_Videl --_

_Breathe, Gohan._

He takes a fourth breath. On Namek a cool breeze brings the alien scent of ajisa over the hilltop, and they’re looking for a Dragonball, and Frieza is nothing but a word. He takes a fifth breath. In the white timeless void in the Chamber of Spirit and Time, Goku tells him he’s proud, he’s so proud.

 _Saiyan or human,_ he says. _Can’t decide if the past hurts or helps._

 _Both,_ she says.

_Both?_

_Both. It does both. I bet if you talked to Vegeta or Bulma they’d say so. I mean, Vegeta might get all pissy, but I think that’s a Vegeta thing, not a Saiyan thing._

_I --_

_Gohan, you get all wrapped up in what’s one or the other, but you’re both. You can’t --_ she motions, like pulling apart a piece of dough -- _You can’t take them apart and decide one is such and the other is such._

Gohan furrows his brow and thinks on that one. His mother used to get him to recite prime numbers or trigonometric ratios of special angles when he needed to focus, and he’d survived the first rounds of the Cell games thinking _two, three, five, seven, eleven._ He’d gotten to seven-fifty-seven before throwing his first punch, and then his thought process had shifted to other, more important things.

 _I dunno,_ he says, finally. _I thought, maybe after all the fighting was over, it would get easier. Maybe -- maybe after I met you._

(Vegeta killed Nappa, and then Goku had said, _I bet your mom’s at Master Roshi’s. Why don’t you go give her a big hug for me?_ And Gohan, heading east, battered and despairing, had thought, _I wonder if loving her makes him brave.)_

Videl says, _wanna fly for a bit?  
  
_

* * *

  
She throws on a bra and one of his t-shirts, and he throws on boxers and a t-shirt, and they lift off into the night. North would take them to Satan City, and south to Kame House, and east to the ocean -- so they head west, towards Fire Mountain.

“Dad says a while back there was a mountain here, always on fire, home of this giant warlord,” she says. “And then, like, twenty years ago, the whole mountain just kind of...disappeared?”

“That was my dad,” Gohan says.

“Your dad...disappeared a mountain?”

“My dad’s teacher. Fired, er, fired a Kamehameha at it. You remember Grandpa Ox? My mom’s dad?”

“Oh.” They’re hanging in the air over the village, hazy in the midnight air, with the soft blue warmth of a thousand kis asleep -- and when it hits her, Gohan feels that electrochemical surge as though it was his own. “Oh. The Ox King. Gohan, your grandfather is the Lord of Fire Mountain.”

“He bought me a lot of books when I was younger. I don’t, um.” He’s stumbling into rather fond memories he’d forgotten about, wonderful parts of him that got pushed out by Namek and Cell. “I don’t think he ever learned to read. Mom taught herself and Dad, and I taught Grandpa.”

“Gohan.”

He turns to her. “Hm?”

“That’s really sweet.”

So there’s Videl silhouetted by a glorious full moon, in an oversized t-shirt. There had been this moment years earlier -- Gohan must have been fourteen or fifteen, still homeschooled but Dad was gone -- when he’d dropped by Capsule Corp for an errand for his mom, and Bulma had insisted he stay for dinner. Vegeta had pulled him aside afterward, and said, _what did your father tell you about Blutz Waves?_

And Gohan, forcibly remembering the moment Vegeta had pulled him aside on Namek, an altercation that ended with a knee to his kidney, said _nothing_.

_Of course._

In a perfect world Vegeta would have given him a book or a tape explaining it, but nothing of that sort survived -- not that Saiyans had much written language to begin with, beyond a rudimentary alphabet and numeral system they’d picked up from Frieza, one that Vegeta refused to use or share. Instead, they’d had a ten thousand year oral history that had gone up in flames. Vegeta couldn’t like Gohan and Gohan couldn’t feel safe around Vegeta, but Vegeta was the speaker of the dead and there was no-one else but baby Trunks, and you have to live with that.

\-- So he’d taught Gohan about Blutz Waves, a spectrum of light human eyes couldn’t perceive and Saiyan eyes didn’t pick out as colour, that his father and his father’s father and his father’s father’s father had passed to him, that he’d tell Trunks, that Gohan would tell his kid, if he ever had one; he told him the difference between warm light and cold light, fake light, the reflection of light, the inversion of light; he told him about the organ Saiyans had at the base of the tail that stored excess ki, a sort of second stomach that released it when Blutz intake hit a critical ratio; and then the evening had ended on this strange sombre note, as they each privately reminisced about the day of the Saiyan invasion, when the had both drank the light of a fake moon, and both lost their tails, and Gohan lost Piccolo, and Vegeta lost his purpose. There was a certain joy and glory in surrendering to the immensity of a moment, a certain fear, and the memory is painful for both.

But Videl doesn’t know about Blutz Waves, not yet at least -- she only knows calculus and contemporary history, penmanship, organic chemistry, music theory, municipal and planetary law, literature, pop culture, strategies in baseball and boxing, the truth about the Cell Games…

“I love you, Videl,” he says.

“Aw, that’s.” She blinks. “Gohan, you, uh. Holy shit.”

“Sorry, I --”

“No, oh my God, don’t apologize. You dork. C’mere.”

He does, and she arranges herself inside his embrace.

“You mean it, Gohan? Not just loopy from overdosing on Blutz?”

Oh. “You --”

“I went and talked with Bulma. Started putting two and two together and wanted some questions answered. The recordings of the Cell Games are all classified, but there’s footage from the Saiyan invasion that’s, um, there if you know where to look. Basic questions, like _so what’s the deal with that fuzzy thing around Vegeta’s waist_. Y’know.”

“I could have told you.”

“Gohan.” He looks down to where she’s tucked herself under his chin, and she’s gone all misty-eyed. “You,” and neither of them miss the way her voice cracks, “When you talk about that stuff, it’s not like, _there’s a gland in my tail_ , or, um, _Cell’s instability was due to it being a mish-mash of alien and human DNA,_ or whatever _._ You were there and it hurt. Someday I’ll ask and you’ll be ready to answer, but not until you’re ready, because.” She’s gone red right down her neck, and mumbles: “Because I love you too.”

Oh, Hell, so that’s why she’d been all flustered -- Gohan feels that right in his stomach, and it’s a dizzying lift like gathering ki before a fight, makes him feel like a moonrise, like safety, like home. He swallows hard against the lump in his throat. He leans down and she looks up and then of course they’re kissing, deep and warm and wet.

Videl catches his lip with her teeth when they pull apart and gives a little smile.

“I love all of you,” she says. “I love that you’re funny and smart and kind. I love that you’re really, _really_ hot. And that’s not a Saiyan thing or a human thing. You’re not, um. You’re not half of a thing, okay? You’re just. A great guy, and I’m really lucky to have met you.”

Gohan tries to gather up all the different things he loves about Videl but words fall short, so he kisses her again, and again, and again, until everything is pushed aside but the two of them and the sunrise over Fire Mountain, their two stories colliding at dawn, the feeling of her ki spiralling deep into his stomach until one could not be distinguished from the other…

And then Videl pulls away, suddenly, and says, “Shit, Gohan, the sun.”

“The sun?”

“It’s tomorrow. We have first period Chem.”

(And if only he could get in a time machine and tell himself that some day he’d be kissed breathless into tomorrow and then race home to get dressed for first period Chem.)

If they’re a little rumpled and windswept when they arrive at school, just as the bell’s ringing, nobody says anything; they just seat themselves in the middle row and open their textbooks as normal as their teacher starts explaining the Haber Process. Then Videl elbows Gohan and when he turns, she cranes up to peck him on the lips, and Sharpner yells _fuckin’ called it_ and Erasa begrudgingly slaps twenty zeni on the table and the whole room loses their collective shit, their teacher begs them to contain themselves, teenage hormones, should have taken that internship at Capsule Corp instead of getting a teaching degree, and everything is exactly as it should be.

**Author's Note:**

> find me (not) discussing the Haber Process on [tumblr](https://kanthia.tumblr.com/)


End file.
